Remora

When the best aren�t the brightest, and the brightest have to console themselves with Noam Chomsky. Or, put that in a Venn diagram and stuff it in your pipe, sailor.

Bush will go to war even if it puts him out of power is the headline of an article in the Sunday (London) Times by Edward Luttwak. Headlines are written by a specialized set of editorial room ghosts. This fact continually escapes readers. I know. I�ve written articles crowned by headlines that have the same relation to my article as the image of the barroom seen through a beer bottle by a drunk has to the barroom as seen by a sober boyscout. And in these cases, sophisticated readers (like you) often ask me to explain the headline, as though it flowed from my pen.

But in this case the headline sums up this farrago of nonsense quite well. Oh, get used to it. This is the type of drivel we shall all be reading a lot of, pretty soon. Luttwak is jumping ahead of the curve, crafty syncophant that he is. Building up for another 20 article year at TNR. He does indeed make the argument the headline proclaims: that Bush is going to go to war with Iraq even if it means sacrificing his presidency.

�Everyone who comes into personal contact with him reports that George W Bush has become a man of passionate conviction who sees the struggle to prevent another September 11 as his duty and destiny, regardless of the political consequences. He has been told many times that he now risks winning the war and losing the presidency because of a weak economy and now the huge Enron scandal, but he replies that winning the war is quite enough for him even if he loses the White House. �

When one wants to distinguish bad faith from an honest but fallacious argument, a good indicator is whether the expounder of an argument has thought through the question of self-interest. Luttwak, and Georgie Bush, are both very comfortable with free market economics. That economics relies on the theory that self-interest is a key factor in organizing markets. In fact, most neo-classical economists like equilibrium models because the self-interested agent is easily quantifiable. He or she fits pretty well into the various game theories that model the actions of markets.

So when we are faced with an article in which the premise is that a rational actor is willing to sacrifice his self-interest, we want to know a few things. Is this plausible? Are there self-interested explanations for his action? Does he have a self-sacrificing personality? Is there any indication, from his past history, that he has been self-sacrificing?

Let�s look at Luttwak�s article from the standpoint of plausibility. In the first sentence of the above graf, the phrase , �regardless of the political consequences,� implies the risk that G.B. will suffer politically for his convictions. To make this plausible, one searches around for, say, poll data showing that G.B. is suffering a loss of popularity for his tenacious stand on foreign policy. And that such a loss is not effecting him.

Luttwak doesn�t want to make that argument because, of course, it is ludicrous. G.B. is being rewarded with popularity for his current stand on the war. The first thing we should notice about the whole tenor of Luttwak�s article is the implausibility of one of the premises.

But perhaps he is saying that Bush is ignoring that rise in popularity. This is an odd assertion. If Bush were a corporation, would we want to say that it is continuing to sell a profitable item regardless of the fact that it is profitable? That�s the kind of saying that any economist will reject, rightly, out of hand. In fact, the direction of motivation should go the other way. Because G.B. is being rewarded, he wants to continue warmongering. This explanation takes into account self-interest in a traditional way. In fact, I would imagine Luttwak constructing just the opposite story for a politician like Saddam Hussein or Milosovic. There are even parallel reasons. If we are at war, a more plausible, a more conservative argument would go, it is probably to counter-balance things like a bad economy. A bad economy wiped out Bushie one.

Now, perhaps Luttwak thinks GBII�s �passion� is making him self-sacrificing. Are there evidences of this in his past? The short answer, and the long answer, are both no. Ever since joining the National Guard, GBII has been an exemplary rational agent, maximizing his gain at every opportunity. There is no evidence that he has ever sacrificed his own interests for something higher than himself. Closest, I suppose, would be his acceptance of our Lord Jesus Christ into his capacious heart, but that acceptance, on his own account, hinged on a quite utilitarian matter. He needed to stop drinking. Drunk driving tickets, as he knew, were a real career-killer. Hence, it was Jesus or pay some counselor that you'd have to hide, twenty years down the road, when you ran for political office in Texas. Jesus was the lower cost.

So, our question should be not, is Luttwak right here. It should be, what does Luttwak gain by this article? With an assessment of Iraq (�As for the American decision to finish with Saddam one way or another, its reasons are exactly as stated in the Bush speech before Congress: Saddam�s regime still wants to reoccupy Kuwait and dominate Arabia; it already has some weapons of mass destruction and is smuggling in technology for more. That combination is an unacceptable danger, which must be ended�) that is not only ridiculous, but contains no casus belli � as Luttwak, who is not an idiot, knows, and with the tactful dropping of the reference to Iran, we can see Luttwak positioning himself. He is, above all, serious. Because his article�s premises are ludicrous, and his defense of the American regime is less analysis than a wet tongued osculation of the good old White House derriere, Luttwak has to maintain that implacable, that politburo seriousness. Laugh, and the whole web of deceit falls away.

Laugh, reader. Cast a cold eye upon Luttwak (and his tribe � the commentariat that ranges from the Weekly Standard to the TNR � all right turns, as J. Edgar used to tell his chauffeur), and laugh. Laugh your melancholy butt off.